This selection from our collection—a selection that
excludes photographs (the pieces by Dyan Marie and Thrush Holmes,
while photo-based, are really poems), most of our graphic works,
ethnographic pieces (masks and objects from Africa and New Guinea)
and works of sculpture—represents, in miniature, the range of our
interests and enthusiasms, a range which, encountered so immediately
and in such high focus, must, of necessity, seem rather hectic and
perhaps over-eclectic.
And indeed we have collected—though that seems too
deliberate a term (acquired would be closer to the
mark)—eclectically, spontaneously, intuitively. There is no
visionary master narrative at the helm of this unashamedly bad hoc
collection. While we have purchased works, always for astonishingly
little money, and traded for them, most of the things in our
collection were simply given to us by our artist-friends (a kind and
generous lot!).
This gifting never had anything to do, I hasten to
add, with the fact that I was writing widely and regularly, in
magazines and newspapers, about contemporary art. The only work in
the collection directly generated by my writing is Nicole Collins’s
“735 Marks for G.M.D” which was a playfully mordant response to a
Globe & Mail piece I had written about her which happened to be
735 words long.
Some of the pieces were wedding gifts (the John
Heward Self-Portrait, among them); Harold Klunder gave us his
self-portrait painting (in an act of baroque munificence) only
because we once put him up for a night so he wouldn’t have to travel
back to Montreal in a storm. Toronto art dealer Olga Korper traded
me the delectable Susanna Heller “Venice” plaque for a limited
edition copy of a book of my poems (I’m pretty sure I was the winner
in that little exchange!). Some of the works (a John Scott drawing
and a Natalka Husar painting) were personal offerings to Malgorzata
(Natalka’s painting—an uncanny likeness—came in the mail a few days
after my introducing her to Malgorzata on the street, a meeting that
lasted only a couple of minutes); the Tony Urquhart drawing from
1958 is a drawing I saw as a student and which, as the first
abstract work I ever loved, changed my life (when, after thirty
years or so, I described the drawing to him, he disappeared into his
studio and came back holding it in his hand. “Is this the one?” he
asked me. It was. And so he gave it to me).
Too many of the works in the exhibition are by dear
friends, no longer with us—and whom we miss every day: Guido
Molinari, Harold Town, William Ronald (Bill used to give me a
painting every time I visited his studio; I used to take it home
wet, balancing it on my knees in the taxi as if it were a hot
pizza), Peter Aspell, Rick Gorman, David Bolduc, Gerald Ferguson and
my dear Barker Fairley—who was like a father to me.
(Gary Michael Dault) |